History's Toughest Heroes: Henry Johnson: Hellfighter

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Speaker 1 Crowds of cheering New Yorkers packed the sidewalks along Fifth Avenue.

Speaker 1 It was the 17th of February, 1919.

Speaker 1 And everyone was celebrating from millionaires to messenger boys. It seemed the whole city had come out to wave flags and cheer the returning heroes.

Speaker 5 Everybody's out on the streets, lining the streets from kind of way downtown all the way uptown.

Speaker 1 Some of the first troops back from war in Europe paraded along the avenue. Welcome banners and the stars and stripes hung from mansions and department stores.
The crowd roared.

Speaker 1 These warriors weren't just Americans.

Speaker 1 They were New Yorkers. And one of the most popular military bands in the Army, they led the way.

Speaker 5 They're playing sort of like this really vigorous celebratory music. The soldiers are marching proudly.

Speaker 1 Now normally parades move south down Fifth Avenue, but not this one.

Speaker 6 It starts at Madison Square Park

Speaker 6 and it does something different. It goes up Fifth Avenue.
It's going to end in Harlem.

Speaker 1 The 369th were marching right to their own front doors.

Speaker 1 This was a black infantry unit.

Speaker 1 In France, it won a fearsome reputation and a nickname to match.

Speaker 1 The Harlem Hellfighters.

Speaker 6 This unit would spend more time on the front than any other American unit, 190 days on the front.

Speaker 1 They held the line between the German army and Paris in 1918.

Speaker 1 They were the first Americans to reach the Rhine.

Speaker 6 They never lost a man to capture or a foot of ground that they had taken.

Speaker 1 Now they marched French fashion, 16 by 16, trousers neatly creased, coats pressed, polished bayonets catching the sun. Some injured men rode in open-top cars.

Speaker 1 In one car, with his arms full of flowers, was Henry Johnson.

Speaker 5 Almost everybody who was at that parade,

Speaker 5 if they had read a paper at any point in the past year and a half, had heard of Henry Johnson.

Speaker 5 There's talk in the immediate aftermath of the war about making a movie of his life with him starring in it. Like he's really on top of the world.

Speaker 1 Roars of welcome greeted him. Oi, you, Henry Johnson, the crowd shouted.
Oi, you, Black Death.

Speaker 1 Henry Johnson made his name one bloody night in the trenches of France he made headlines around the world

Speaker 5 it's almost like a scene from a movie be it a war movie or a superhero movie now he had the world at his feet

Speaker 1 but heroes don't always get what they deserve

Speaker 1 I'm Ray Winstone And for BBC Radio 4, this is history's toughest heroes.

Speaker 1 True stories of adventurers, rebels, and survivors who lived life on the edge.

Speaker 1 Henry Johnson, Hellfighter.

Speaker 5 Johnson captures the story of African-American soldiers in the First World War, the way that they were called upon to do a remarkable amount of heroic work, and the ways in which that work was devalued.

Speaker 1 Adrian Lynch Smith is associate professor of history and African American studies at Duke University, North Carolina. Now, Andrew Johnson was born in 1892 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Speaker 1 It was textile and tobacco country.

Speaker 6 Don't know who his parents are. You know, birth records were not very carefully prepared in those days.

Speaker 1 Professor Jeffrey Salmons is the co-author of Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War. The Civil War ended slavery 30 years before Johnson was born.

Speaker 1 But African Americans were still oppressed and terrorized, especially in the South.

Speaker 6 He would have been denied opportunities for decent employment, wouldn't be able to join unions most likely because they would have been segregated or exclusionary.

Speaker 6 He would have lived in a black neighborhood. Some would call it a slum or a ghetto.
Well, his prospects

Speaker 6 for advancement are dim.

Speaker 1 When Andrew Johnson was six years old, White mobs in Wilmington, North Carolina targeted black-owned businesses. Many of the town's black middle class were murdered or driven out of town.

Speaker 6 And there would be extra legal punishment that would be meted out to blacks in the form of lynching, especially black males.

Speaker 1 Any accusations, especially one of assaulting a white woman, could lead to a black man being hunted down and murdered. No trial, no lawyers, just a mob and a rope.

Speaker 1 The United States government did little to stop them. There had to be a better way of life than this.

Speaker 5 Johnson, like many African Americans in these decades, migrates to the North. This is part of a great migration, one of the maybe the most profound demographic shift in U.S.

Speaker 5 history of African Americans out of the South and into industrial centers in the North.

Speaker 1 Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland. New cities grew fast, built on steel, oil, and innovation.
The northern states were now established as manufacturing powerhouses.

Speaker 1 Johnson's family moved to Albany when he was a teenager. It was a transport hub on the Hudson River, just north of New York City.
Johnson was short and slight, but he found work in a coal yard.

Speaker 6 And it would have been heavy lifting and a rather dirty job.

Speaker 1 He also worked as a chauffeur, a soda mixer, and a porter.

Speaker 1 Then came the First World War.

Speaker 1 To begin with, the United States stayed out of it. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson won the presidency, claiming he'd keep Americans clear of the bloodshed in Europe.

Speaker 1 Then Germany resumed submarine attacks on American shipping. On the 2nd of April, Wilson declared war.

Speaker 1 The government said it was the patriotic duty of every citizen to join the fight for democracy, but they didn't want everyone on the front lines.

Speaker 5 There's an intense resistance to the idea of drafting African Americans

Speaker 5 for military service.

Speaker 1 Black Americans have fought for their country since the Revolutionary War, but the military was strictly segregated. Senator James K.

Speaker 1 Vardeman was clear why he didn't want black Americans to serve, especially in foreign countries.

Speaker 5 In 1916, it says something like, if you draft a Negro and inflate his untutored soul with military airs, it's just a short step from thinking that he should defend his rights at home the same way that he does abroad.

Speaker 1 Many black Americans found the war propaganda insulting.

Speaker 6 And of course, when they hear of this talk of let's make the world safe for democracy, the response of many blacks is let's make America safe for blacks.

Speaker 1 But some community leaders, well, they saw an opportunity.

Speaker 5 Somewhere between the intelligentsia and the sort of civil rights institutionalists, NAACP members, people writing in magazines, that sort of thing, who are saying this is an opportunity for us to show that conduct, not color, is the measure of a man.

Speaker 5 So they have this faith that the war will give them a platform to show their fellow Americans and the world how deserving they are of the rights of citizenship.

Speaker 1 In June 1917, Henry Johnson signed up. The 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard was the first all-black militia unit in the city.
The governor insisted a white officer led the unit.

Speaker 1 Now that officer, Colonel William Hayward, he was a strong supporter of his men. He signed up band leader James Rhys Europe and used his music as a recruiting tool.

Speaker 1 He told white officers, if they couldn't treat the men with respect, they should serve somewhere else. In early October, Johnson arrived in South Carolina for basic training.

Speaker 1 The men of the 15th were sent to a camp just outside Spartanburg.

Speaker 5 To a place that really did not want black troops and certainly didn't want what they thought of as being black northern troops who might cause trouble.

Speaker 1 The town's mayor said the Harlem soldiers would be treated like the town's resident Negroes. So, in other words, badly.

Speaker 5 In those two weeks, they talked about being subject to basically excessive policing, to police violence, to taunts and insults and slurs from the town.

Speaker 1 A musician in the regimental band walks into the hotel lobby to buy a newspaper.

Speaker 5 The hotel proprietor comes up and knocks him to the ground and says, damn the government and basically damn these soldiers.

Speaker 5 I will never let a black man come into my building without taking his hat off and proceeds to just wail on him.

Speaker 1 His fellow soldiers, including white men, rushed to defend him. Only the intervention of band leader Lieutenant Europe stopped a riot.
He told them all to get their hats and coats and leave quietly.

Speaker 5 So they basically have to get them out of Spartanburg to maintain the peace.

Speaker 6 The leadership are begging the authorities to send them overseas.

Speaker 1 Now thanks to racial tensions, Henry Johnson and his comrades were off to Europe with only two weeks of training under their belts.

Speaker 1 On the first day of 1918, the New York 15th finally set foot on French soil. They landed at Brest on the northwest tip of France.
It was bitterly cold, but they got a warm welcome from the locals.

Speaker 1 The French were worn down by a war and happened to see fresh troops, and the regimental band's jazz was a hit.

Speaker 5 When you're going about towns, to be treated as an American first and a black person second? There's a lot of talk about interracial friendships and romances.

Speaker 5 It feels liberatory to African American soldiers.

Speaker 1 It was exactly what white supremacists in the United States have been afraid of. The 15th were put to work as laborers, but they lobbied hard for a combat mission.

Speaker 1 And after three years of carnage, the French army were desperate for soldiers to fight alongside them. Pressed by both sides, American top brass agreed to let the men serve under French command.

Speaker 1 The French soldiers greeted them with open arms. Johnson and his fellow recruits were given French rifles and they were now officially the 369th Infantry Regiment.

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Speaker 1 In April, they reached the front lines in northeastern France.

Speaker 1 The battlefield was a maze of bomb craters, blasted trees and mud. Trenches snaked through the landscape busy with rats.

Speaker 1 Raids went back and forth along with fierce shelling and the zipper sniper bullets.

Speaker 1 In the early hours of the 14th of May, a corporal and five men were in one of these observation observation posts.

Speaker 1 The corporal and two soldiers slept, while two more, Needham Roberts and Henry Johnson, stood watch.

Speaker 6 They were in advance of the trench line, almost in no man's land.

Speaker 1 Now the Germans staged nighttime raids to kill or capture groups of soldiers in lightning attacks.

Speaker 6 So Needham Roberts and Henry Johnson are at an advanced outpost in the Argonne forest with the responsibility of detecting German or enemy movements.

Speaker 1 The observation post was a bunker surrounded by barbed wire. Roberts and Johnson listen for any sound of movement in the dead of night.

Speaker 1 And as it happens, they do hear something.

Speaker 1 A strange gnawing close by.

Speaker 5 They hear the sound of wires being cut.

Speaker 1 That could have been rats.

Speaker 6 They call out, but there's no response.

Speaker 1 Then Johnson saw movement. He shouted, Corporal of the guard, and sent up a flare.

Speaker 1 The Germans attacked from two sides, hurling grenades over the barbed wire. One explosion collapsed the dugout, sealing the corporal and the other two men inside.

Speaker 1 Johnson and Roberts were on their own.

Speaker 5 All of a sudden, they're just Germans coming out them.

Speaker 6 Many believe with the intent of capturing these two individuals, for the purpose of gaining intelligence, but also of harming morale.

Speaker 6 The Germans are there and they can come get us and take away our soldiers.

Speaker 1 There were more than 20 Germans. Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts were already injured.
Roberts could no longer stand.

Speaker 5 They start hurling grenades at them. Roberts is wounded very early on, so he's at a point where all he can do is hand Henry Johnson the grenades.

Speaker 1 As the enemy charged, Johnson struggled to his feet and raised his rifle. Only three shots in the clip.
At close range, he emptied it into the first soldier.

Speaker 6 Henry Johnson used his rifle. He fired upon them.
The rifle jammed.

Speaker 1 The next soldier was already on top of him.

Speaker 5 So he ends up clubbing another member of the raiding party.

Speaker 1 Now he swung his rifle like a baseball bat, knocking the man to the ground. Other enemy soldiers try to grab Roberts and carry him away.
Johnson unsheaths his knife.

Speaker 6 Henry Johnson jumped atop of one of the soldiers and stabbed him through the skull with a bolo knife.

Speaker 6 Another soldier came at Henry and Henry gutted him once again with the bolo knife.

Speaker 1 Bolo knives were small machetes used to clear undergrowth.

Speaker 1 The man Johnson had sent flying staggered to his feet and started shooting.

Speaker 1 Johnson was hit in his arm and his side. He sank to his knees as the German soldier rounded on him, ready to finish him off.

Speaker 1 But as he got too close, Johnson slashed upwards, disemboweling his attacker.

Speaker 6 And I guess the resistance proved to be unexpected and too much, and the Germans fled.

Speaker 1 Well, Johnson kept lobbing grenades at them as they scrambled away.

Speaker 5 And Johnson is still basically yelling for his corporal, yelling for backup as he passes out.

Speaker 1 A relief party finally reached them. Then Johnson collapsed.

Speaker 6 It's an amazing feat of courage, but also of survival. And that's one of the characteristics that defined Henry Johnson, that he seemed to have had incredible survival instincts.

Speaker 6 It would have been very easy to have surrendered, but it didn't seem to be in his DNA.

Speaker 1 The next day, the bravery of both Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts was honored by the French.

Speaker 6 Henry Johnson was awarded the Quadi de Guerre.

Speaker 1 Johnson was one of the first Americans to receive it.

Speaker 6 These are the first two real combat heroes on the American side in terms of ground combat infantry.

Speaker 1 Now back in the United States, it wasn't well known that black soldiers were even serving in combat on the front lines.

Speaker 1 The white officers of the 369th knew they weren't supposed to boast about the achievements of their men. But Captain Arthur Little had investigated the scene himself.

Speaker 5 Little then is meeting with a group of reporters who are visiting the front lines who are like, do you have any good stories? And Little's like, not really.

Speaker 5 And then they're like, well, don't you have any like stories of fights or something?

Speaker 1 And he's like, well, actually.

Speaker 1 The newspapers ran with it. The United States Army was forced to admit that black troops were actually embedded with the French.

Speaker 5 The African-American press will take this and they'll do everything you would expect.

Speaker 5 This is black heroism, this is black courage, this is black people doing as they always do, which is to give more to this nation that they love unreasonably than that nation has been willing to give back to them.

Speaker 1 But the racism in some of the write-ups was pretty obvious.

Speaker 5 There are ways, again, to highlight that it's courage, and sure, it's impressive, but it's almost instinctual.

Speaker 1 Or, oh,

Speaker 5 he did some shooting, but really, we know how black men are with the knife.

Speaker 6 This is a trope that blacks fought with knives and razors. Rarely do we hear about them with guns.

Speaker 6 This is sort of a white representation of the violent black person as one who yields a razor or a knife.

Speaker 1 Most of the bones in one of Johnson's feet were removed. His shattered shin bone was replaced with a silver tube.
But he insisted on returning to his unit. He was promoted to sergeant.

Speaker 1 As the news of his bravery spread back home, his fame created a golden opportunity for a few chances.

Speaker 5 The industry of Henry Johnson impersonators that pops up

Speaker 6 before,

Speaker 5 the war has even ended is really striking. So he's also appropriated by people who are trying to literally profit off of his actions and his story by pretending to be him.

Speaker 5 And then also by photographers who are taking pictures of basically random folks and being like, this is Henry Johnson. Buy a photo.

Speaker 1 In August 1918, the United States Army sent a secret memo. They didn't want the French commanders to spoil their black troops by treating them as equals.

Speaker 1 They requested a ban on French soldiers eating, socialising or shaking hands with the black Americans.

Speaker 1 Well, the French ignored it. Newspapers were full of stories about French admiration for the courage of the 369th.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, ordinary Americans joined a letter-writing campaign to President Wilson, demanding he takes a stand against lynchings. On the 26th of July, Wilson described lynching as disgraceful evil.

Speaker 1 He didn't say that most of the lynchings were of black men,

Speaker 1 but the resistance got even uglier.

Speaker 5 We see a spike in lynchings during the war.

Speaker 5 I mean, including in Georgia in 1918, pregnant woman who they lynch for speaking out against violence done to a black man in the community, and in that lynching, actually remove and kill her baby as well.

Speaker 5 And soldiers are hearing about that overseas, which is also feeding into this demoralization.

Speaker 1 The Harlem Hellfires continued to serve with distinction. They were embedded with French troops till the defeat of Germany in November 1918.

Speaker 1 At the beginning of the following year, the 369th, they sailed home. They arrived to a hero's welcome.

Speaker 1 The parade up Fifth Avenue was a powerful moment for the soldiers, for Harlem, and for Henry Johnson. But some black soldiers found their service made them a target.

Speaker 5 We see soldiers who are forcibly made to take off their uniforms. We see lynchings of soldiers in uniforms.

Speaker 5 We see explosions of riots, we might call them, but they really look more like pogroms, right? So, white mob violence in places like Washington, D.C., or Chicago, or Longview, Texas.

Speaker 1 But Henry Johnson, he was treated as a hero.

Speaker 5 He triumphantly arrives in New York City. He returns to Albany.
You know, they basically want to offer him the keys to the city. There's talk of buying him a house.

Speaker 5 He goes on speaking tours, kind of nationally, not just in the New York area.

Speaker 1 Johnson was asked to give a public speech in St. Louis, Missouri.

Speaker 6 He uses the opportunity to

Speaker 6 condemn the white military, United States military, especially the Marines and especially officers. He says many of them were cowards and racists, etc.

Speaker 1 Some cheered, but lots of people in the audience wanted to hear war stories. They didn't want to hear him complain.

Speaker 1 Johnson gave them hell.

Speaker 5 He doesn't always say the things that the people who script the heroic narratives would like him to say.

Speaker 1 A group of white Marines were furious about Johnson's speech.

Speaker 6 So they take it upon themselves to visit Henry Johnson later that night at his hotel. And the person who answers the door, when they ask for Henry Johnson, he says, well, Henry's not here.

Speaker 6 But they actually use this as an opportunity to go back to where they came from and get reinforcements to get Henry the next day.

Speaker 6 And Henry's gone.

Speaker 1 Now, after the war, white supremacist officials and officers did what they could to play down heroism of black soldiers.

Speaker 5 Henry Johnson turned that narrative on its head. That is infuriating to

Speaker 5 many white Americans in the audience. It's embarrassing for many African Americans who are trying to work within the politics of respectability to pursue the freedom struggle.

Speaker 5 And so very quickly, people began moving away from him.

Speaker 1 One paper said maybe he should enhance his value through mystery and distance. In other words, they wanted him to shut up.

Speaker 1 But Johnson's story was still worth telling years after the war ended.

Speaker 1 One person who wrote about his bravery was Theodore Roosevelt Jr.,

Speaker 1 son of the former president. Henry Johnson dictated a response.

Speaker 1 Esteemed sir, I am writing to you to say I sincerely appreciate the article you had published in the paper concerning me and the way I fought to help protect this country during a struggle.

Speaker 6 I'm very sorry to state that I don't think my Uncle Sam is treating me just right as my pension has been reduced to $60 per month.

Speaker 1 A sick wife, a weakened body, and my health is gone, thus making it utterly impossible for me to work. How am I to make it in this life?

Speaker 1 Now thanks to Johnson's war injuries, he struggled to hold down a job. And because he wouldn't say what people wanted to hear, the the speaking gigs dried up.
He lived in poverty and turned to drink.

Speaker 1 In 1929, he died. He was just 39.

Speaker 5 He's buried in Arlington Cemetery, but by and large, he's abandoned and forgotten.

Speaker 1 In the 1970s, a campaign began to recognize Henry Johnson. In 1991, Albany's Veterans Day Parade was marched in his honor, and a boulevard in the city was named after him.

Speaker 1 And decades after his death, he was awarded the Purple Heart, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Medal of Honor.

Speaker 5 Johnson is part of a cohort of people who will fill the ranks of the freedom strugglers. His is the tragedy, right? Not everybody makes it to the other side.

Speaker 5 We lose him along the way, but he's moving alongside people who keep on going.

Speaker 5 We need heroes. We need people to shorthand the stories around.
We need people who make us understand the humanity, the costs, and the sacrifices of the struggle. And

Speaker 5 Johnson does that work for us.

Speaker 1 Next time on history's toughest heroes. Marjorie Kemp always tells it like it is, but in medieval England, such straight talking can get a woman killed.

Speaker 5 By this time, word has got around about Marjorie Kemp's reputation as being this sort of difficult, perplexing woman.

Speaker 1 Marjorie Kemp, Ministry of Tears.

Speaker 1 When you look at what's going on around the world, it's easy to think that we humans are incapable of living peacefully. But there are out there people who disagree.

Speaker 1 I keep going because someone has to hold the line between grief and revenge.

Speaker 1 I'm Matthew Seid and in my Sideways mini-series Chasing Peace from BBC Radio 4 I'm meeting people who have radical ideas about how we can stop what feels like an inevitable slide into conflict.

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